Knyght

Welcome to the Course and Best of Luck Knyght,

Hopefully you will enjoy around here. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask, we will be around for you. Meanwhile good luck on tables, we will be waiting for your homework.

You can now start with your 1st Lesson:
Lesson #1

The whole course plan:
Overview of Beginners Course

Best Regards.

Finally got myself to be bothered to do this.

Homework 1:
Question 1: What is your motivation for playing poker?
I liked Hasenbraten's analogy of Starcraft here. Starcraft is fun but you can't play money while you do it (unless you're Korean). A side-income is great. It'd also be nice if I can improve my on-the-fly maths skills. But mostly I enjoy it.

Question 2: What are your weaknesses when playing poker?
My post-flop play needs work. It's been getting better lately, but I still have a lot of leaks. I cbet too often and often unnecessarily inflate the pot. In other situations, my odds calculations are pretty terrible (mental arithmetic isn't my strong point atm) and I miss out on profitable situations. Also I get a bit tilty. When I lost a bit of money, it escalates pretty quickly. I've partially solved this one by setting myself both a very small stop-loss limit (2 buyins) and by setting myself a somewhat strict time-limit.

Question 3: What does it mean to play tight aggressive?
Tight: Only playing hands that are profitable in the current sitations.
Aggressive: Raising rather than calling/checking, mostly, I suppose. Play your good hands aggressively.
It works because you avoid marginal situations. Especially with the starting hands chart you avoid difficult post-flop decisions.

Good job! Homework #1 Done!

Most of the weakness you wrote can easily be fixed by posting hands (analyzing your session). We will start writing feedback to your play. Usually negative feedback will put you into thinking phase and trying to fix all those leaks. It's almost the same as you lose money, you will remember it more than winning part. By this situation it's gonna be that negative feedback you gonna remember and try to avoid them next time.

Also that very good that you are aware about stop-loss technique.

Tight style is usually called playing selected hands. Like following the Starting Hand Chart. Aggressive should be also pretty clear that already the word says how you should be playing. But the problem playing aggressively is that you have to watch that you don't play too aggressive. Find good spots, find good targets. About The tight-aggressive strategy you can read in this article: "What is the Big Stack Strategy?"

Hopefully you will enjoy the Course.

Homework 2 time.

Question 1: What do you think you could play differently than suggested in the BSS Starting Hands Chart and why?
Quite a lot of stuff. The starting hands chart is intentionally nitty to avoid difficult post-flop decisions. The stuff I currently play differently:
1. I widen my range quite a lot on the button and slightly on the cutoff for stealing.
2. I like to open raise most pocket pairs depending on who is ahead of me. If they're particularly tight I'll raise even 22+, though against looser opponents who like to call raises to see the flop I tend to clam up and stick to TT+ for raising. Open limping I try to avoid now, but limping behind I don't mind for small pockets.
3. I also don't mind open-raising AQs from UTG. It's a bit too strong to just fold.
4. Today I've been widening my resteal range as a bit of a test. It's worked pretty nicely, only got called twice and only had to fold once out of quite a few resteals.

Question 2: Do you have questions about your preflop play? Post your hand for evaluation.
Although these days I'm... somewhat happy with my preflop play there are still some things I do that I'm unsure about. Sometimes I raise things that might be a bit silly and sometimes I fold good hands and lose some potential equity. And since I've been playing with resteals, here's one I'm not sure about.

Question 3: What is the equity of AKo against the top 5% range? 5% means 88+, AJs+, KQs, AKo.
A bit over 46% This makes sense. Although AKo is beaten quite handedly by AKs and particularly 88+, it has a serious amount of equity over the other hands in the top 5%

Whee, homework.

Good job! Homework #2 Done!

Totally agree with you about the stealing ranges. They can be very easily be balanced with even wider range. Depending on the opponent you can as well put a wider stealing range. Against some tight opponents who give up their blinds either preflop or postflop, why not to adjust? Against some shorties you can even steal with smaller raise, for example 3xBB. But don't overdo the stealing situations. Sometimes you might just put yourself into too many difficult spots if opening with marginal hands.

Playing PPs can be in long run be very profitable, we could even say that you earn the most money with them. You can always try out either you play them profitable or not by check the programs either you are doing great on early position with PPs or not and base according to that.

Also I do agree about AQo, the hand is strong enough to play and of course yuo can always keep track while playing in your tracker how you doing with them.

About Question #3:

       Equity     Win     Tie
UTG    46.32%  37.92%   8.41% { AKo }
UTG+1  53.68%  45.27%   8.41% { 88+, AJs+, KQs, AKo }

Hopefully you enjoy the Course so far.

I miss Veriz

Anyway, been away for a while. Balls deep in studying and then had to move. Finally playing a bit more regularly and have more time to learn. Which I clearly need to.

Homework 3:

1. We're roughly even here, a slight edge at 50.78%. The flop really sucks for us. The flush draw looks nice but against a set it isn't so great. Even if we catch up we could be behind again if a full house completes. 26.46%

2. Villain isn't running a full stack so is probably fishy. The min-raise helps us think this way also. We have a gutshot and a flushdraw here, which gives us 3:1 pot odds. We need to pay 0,22 to win a pot of 0.87. Even without working out the pot odds, it's an easy call.

3. Damn. yes, so many. Why do I suck so much would be a good place to start. I have so many leaks here that I don't even know how to narrow it down. Here's a hand eval thread I made from my winning hand of today's session, which looks a bit dodgy to me: Nl2 Jj

Hi Knyght,

1) Looks good. Well done. I recommend you use poker equilab for your hand reviews (as needed).

2) BB is running a short stack however BU is the one making the small min/raise.

3) Posting hands and attending the coachings (along with watching the videos here) is a great place to start to improve your overall game.

I suggest you make a list of a few things you want to improve on and actively work on them

As a side note I've also commented on the hand you posted today.